More self-advertisement of your papers – Use of Social Networking Services for PEPS -

Masaki Satoh, Professor of the Atmosphere
and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo

I have been a member of the editorial board
of PEPS and section chief editor of atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences since
PEPS started in 2013. I have also been the chief editor of the Journal of the
Meteorological Society of Japan (JMSJ) for more than five years. Both of these
international journals are published in Japan, and I think we need to make more
effort to enhance the publicity of these journals and the papers in them.

The very best papers will automatically become
well known without any advertisement. However such papers are rare, and more
normal papers, even if they are good, require some effort to increase their visibility
and get publicity. Traditionally researchers have done this by attending international
conferences to give presentations of their research and inform the widest
possible audience of their work. I would like to discuss here a more modern way
of obtaining such publicity by using Social Networking Services (SNS).

Recently, many journal web sites have been
using “Altmetric”, a journal metric designed to measure the immediate
social impact of papers. The Altmetric score is provided by http://www.altmetric.com/, and calculates how
frequently a paper is referred to by the news media and SNS such as Facebook
and Twitter. The Altmetric score is a prompt metric, and allows researchers to
say things like “this article is in the
99 percentile (ranked 214th) of the 106,052 tracked articles of a similar age
in all journals”. At the SpringerOpen PEPS
website, the Altmetric Score is now provided in addition to other article
metrics such as total accesses. For an example, please see http://www.progearthplanetsci.com/content/1/1/18/about.

When they write activity reports of their
studies, researchers are often concerned with citations of their papers.
Recently, Altmetric is being similarly used for measuring the popularity of
papers.If a paper obtains a good
Altmeric score, it would be useful to refer to this in an activity report.

A truly excellent paper or a paper in a
currently fashionable area will automatically tend to get a high Altmetric
Score. Other good papers, however, need an effort to increase their score. Because
of this, many publishers or journals including PEPS are now using SNS to
enhance publicity. The PEPS SNS sites are:

Information about new paper releases and SPecial
calls for Excellent Papers on hot topicS (SPEPS) are immediately announced on
the official PEPS Facebook and Twitter pages.

To better publicize your paper, please
think about using self-citation where appropriate. Of course many say that a self-citation
should not count as a real citation, but there is a real possibility that
self-citation will increase awareness of a paper and lead to others citing it
as well. To put it bluntly, a paper without any citations, without even self-citations,
is a terrible paper: the author has wasted his/her time writing it and it merely
serves to reduce the citation index of the journal that publishes it. If I am
honest, I would like to avoid such papers being published in our journals. I
would therefore like to ask researchers to think about using SNS to publicize
their work in order to increase their Altmetric score and their citations.
Please introduce your paper by SNS in order to advertise it.

On the PEPS Facebook and Twitter pages, a
new paper is announced when the paper is released on SpringerOpen (http://www.progearthplanetsci.com/)
or when a Japanese Highlight is posted on the PEPS website (http://progearthplanetsci.org/highlights_j.html).
We immediately notify the authors of these posts. I would like to ask all
authors to help themselves and to help us by following or clicking the posts or
by retweeting to introduce their paper. I know some of you will find this
distasteful, but for better or for worse this is the world that we now live in.
Please start by registering with Facebook and Twitter if you do not already have
accounts.

Thank you.

Prof. Masaki Satoh, Section Chief Editor of Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences, Atmosphere
and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo